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The Africa Institute hosts historian Hannah Elsisi to share her work titled, “Genres of Captivity: Gender, Punishment and Historiography in the African Post Colony” on Wednesday, October 18, 2023 (12:00 noon – 02:00 pm) in The Africa Institute auditorium (Location Map).
Accounts of modern African and Middle East history are filled with power struggles, sovereignty disputes, and freedom movements. Prisons play a central role in these narratives. Postcolonial history often includes ‘large waves of arrests,’ ‘imprisoned intellectuals,’ and ‘repression campaigns,’ but what happens next is rarely explored.
Power contests continue beyond arrests; life doesn’t stop at prison gates. That is, prisons do not spell the death of politics or, even necessarily, of bodies. If anything, the space of the prison was a pivotal site of subject formation, power contestation, and cultural production in Egypt and across postcolonial Africa and the Middle East. Prisons, then, might be reconstrued alongside such spaces as the market, the coffeehouse, and the mosque as spatial anchors of African and Middle East history. So, what do prisons do? What kind of social and political order do they produce and reproduce? Much is made and unmade in prison: political subjectivities, networks and organizations, cultural production, disciplinary regimes, hegemonic orders, and normative genders. Carcerality is productive: of self, society, and state. Of history, too; epistemological captivity cannot be parsed out from these processes. What is to be gained by imputing postcolonial technologies of governance, often coercive, to wholesale importation by colonial administrators, or ‘aping’ adaptation by modernizing elites? How do the broader categories of captivity and confinement change our origin stories of penal history, and therefore necessarily of global state and subject formation? Can a new carceral historiography drive postcolonial politics of life and freedom?
Professor Elsisi is a historian specializing in North Africa and South-West Asia, with a particular focus on the ‘Global Mangrove Archipelago.’ She explores global histories of power, mobility, and subjectivity within capitalist, carceral, racialized, and gendered regimes. Currently, she serves as an Assistant Professor of History and Gender Studies at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and is a Senior Research Fellow at King’s College in the Department of Political Economy.
From 2020 to 2022, Professor Elsisi held the position of Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, and she now acts as a Distinguished Scholar, Bye-Fellow, and affiliate Lecturer in the History Faculty. She is also an Advisory Board Member of the Centre for Gender Studies. Previously, Professor Elsisi served as an Assistant Professor in Middle East History at King’s College London from 2018 to 2020 while still pursuing her doctorate.
Professor Elsisi earned her Ph.D in History from Merton College, Oxford University, in 2020. Her thesis received prestigious recognition, including the Malcolm Kerr and Leigh Douglas awards for the best dissertation in Middle East Studies from the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and the British Society of Middle East Studies (BRISMES).
Her latest projects include two upcoming books in 2024: ‘Lovers in the Citadel: Prisons, Gender, and Other Architectures of Subjection in Egypt‘ (Stanford UP) and ‘Behind the Sun: Prison Writing and Abolition in an Egyptian Century‘ (Verso). She’s also working on a new project that encompasses a documentary film (‘Mangle’), a compilation album (‘African Intelligence’), an exhibition (‘Mangue Bit’), and a global history book, ‘Chromosthesisa: Sonic Rights, Labour, and Technology in the Global Mangrove Archipelago.
The seminar will be moderated by Faisal Garba Muhammed, Associate Professor of Sociology, Migration, and Mobility at The Africa Institute. Read more.
Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute reaffirms its mission as a center for the study and research of Africa and its diaspora, and its commitment to the training of a new generation of critical thinkers in African and African Diaspora studies.
The seminar will be in English.
The session is free and open to the public. Registration is mandatory, Click here to book your place.
The Africa Institute hosts historian Hannah Elsisi to share her work titled, “Genres of Captivity: Gender, Punishment and Historiography in the African Post Colony” on Wednesday, October 18, 2023 (12:00 noon – 02:00 pm) in The Africa Institute auditorium (Location Map).
The Africa Institute hosts historian Hannah Elsisi to share her work titled, “Genres of Captivity: Gender, Punishment and Historiography in the African Post Colony” on Wednesday, October 18, 2023 (12:00 noon – 02:00 pm) in The Africa Institute auditorium (Location Map).
Accounts of modern African and Middle East history are filled with power struggles, sovereignty disputes, and freedom movements. Prisons play a central role in these narratives. Postcolonial history often includes ‘large waves of arrests,’ ‘imprisoned intellectuals,’ and ‘repression campaigns,’ but what happens next is rarely explored.
Power contests continue beyond arrests; life doesn’t stop at prison gates. That is, prisons do not spell the death of politics or, even necessarily, of bodies. If anything, the space of the prison was a pivotal site of subject formation, power contestation, and cultural production in Egypt and across postcolonial Africa and the Middle East. Prisons, then, might be reconstrued alongside such spaces as the market, the coffeehouse, and the mosque as spatial anchors of African and Middle East history. So, what do prisons do? What kind of social and political order do they produce and reproduce? Much is made and unmade in prison: political subjectivities, networks and organizations, cultural production, disciplinary regimes, hegemonic orders, and normative genders. Carcerality is productive: of self, society, and state. Of history, too; epistemological captivity cannot be parsed out from these processes. What is to be gained by imputing postcolonial technologies of governance, often coercive, to wholesale importation by colonial administrators, or ‘aping’ adaptation by modernizing elites? How do the broader categories of captivity and confinement change our origin stories of penal history, and therefore necessarily of global state and subject formation? Can a new carceral historiography drive postcolonial politics of life and freedom?
Professor Elsisi is a historian specializing in North Africa and South-West Asia, with a particular focus on the ‘Global Mangrove Archipelago.’ She explores global histories of power, mobility, and subjectivity within capitalist, carceral, racialized, and gendered regimes. Currently, she serves as an Assistant Professor of History and Gender Studies at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and is a Senior Research Fellow at King’s College in the Department of Political Economy.
From 2020 to 2022, Professor Elsisi held the position of Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, and she now acts as a Distinguished Scholar, Bye-Fellow, and affiliate Lecturer in the History Faculty. She is also an Advisory Board Member of the Centre for Gender Studies. Previously, Professor Elsisi served as an Assistant Professor in Middle East History at King’s College London from 2018 to 2020 while still pursuing her doctorate.
Professor Elsisi earned her Ph.D in History from Merton College, Oxford University, in 2020. Her thesis received prestigious recognition, including the Malcolm Kerr and Leigh Douglas awards for the best dissertation in Middle East Studies from the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and the British Society of Middle East Studies (BRISMES).
Her latest projects include two upcoming books in 2024: ‘Lovers in the Citadel: Prisons, Gender, and Other Architectures of Subjection in Egypt‘ (Stanford UP) and ‘Behind the Sun: Prison Writing and Abolition in an Egyptian Century‘ (Verso). She’s also working on a new project that encompasses a documentary film (‘Mangle’), a compilation album (‘African Intelligence’), an exhibition (‘Mangue Bit’), and a global history book, ‘Chromosthesisa: Sonic Rights, Labour, and Technology in the Global Mangrove Archipelago.
The seminar will be moderated by Faisal Garba Muhammed, Associate Professor of Sociology, Migration, and Mobility at The Africa Institute. Read more.
Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute reaffirms its mission as a center for the study and research of Africa and its diaspora, and its commitment to the training of a new generation of critical thinkers in African and African Diaspora studies.
The seminar will be in English.
The session is free and open to the public. Registration is mandatory, Click here to book your place.
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